It’s surprisingly easy, even in today’s connected world, to be completely ignorant of what’s going on out there. My news, like everyone else’s, is filtered: I’ve got some local news sources, some national, some international, but I can’t read everything. Nor do I really try. I click on stories about Nevada, about Michigan, a little bit of national-level politics, any sort of big international news, but I like to watch movies, and hang out with my husband and son, and read books, and so thousands of things happen in the world without me having the slightest bit of awareness about them.
It’s a luxury, of course, to be able to ignore a large portion of the news. Also kind of coasting along inside a cozy bubble is high school senior Jay in Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing. Having already secured admission to the University of Michigan, he’s taking it easy, planning to spend his Spring Break playing video games with his best friend Seth. That is, until his father gives him bad news: his cousin Jun, in the Philippines, has died. Jun was only a few months younger than Jay, and though Jay and his parents had moved to the United States when Jay was only a baby, they had once been close. Jay’s father won’t tell him much, except that Jun’s death was related to the drug war in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte. Feeling guilty that he’d let their connection peter out, Jay decides to use his Spring Break to go to the Philippines himself and investigate what happened to Jun.
Jay’s father’s siblings still live in the Philippines, so he stays at first with Jun’s parents and sisters. While Jay’s uncle, Maning, is a harsh police officer who exercises strict control over his family, Jun’s younger sister Grace introduces him to Mia, a journalism student. With her help, Jay begins to dig into what happened to his cousin. His understanding of who Jun was deepens further when he goes to stay with his aunt and her partner, learning that Jun stayed there for a few years after leaving home. With only a short time before he heads back to the United States and his normal life, Jay needs every bit of help he can get from every member of his family, and Mia, to piece together the end of his cousins’ life.
This is an Issue Book, which isn’t necessary a bad thing. Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak fall into the same category. But they can be tricky to pull off, to ingrate the issue into a fully realized story. Unfortunately for Ribay, he’s not able to really make that happen. I was never able to forget I was reading a book about Duterte’s drug war, and not about people who happened to get caught up in it. I understand what he was trying to do with using Jay, as an American-raised Filipino, to draw in readers who also don’t have a lot of context or understanding and let them make discoveries with Jay as they go along…but what happened was that it ended up having a lot of clunky expositionary dialogue, and some abrupt tone shifts from very casual conversations to ones that suddenly sounded a lot more formal. Every time these kinds of things cropped up, it took me out of the narrative.
It didn’t help that Ribay tries to bite off a little more than he’s really prepared to chew. He makes some broad attempts to incorporate the history of the Philippines, which is certainly relevant, but doesn’t give it enough room to really go anywhere. Much more narrative space is given to Jay and Mia’s romantic tension, which failed to land for me, partly because of thin characterization all around, but I’m not the young adult target audience of this book and maybe that angle played better to the teenage crowd. Representation is important, and it’s nice to see a Filipino-American teen as the lead character and hero, but I wish this was a better book overall. It’s got some bright spots, but is much too uneven to really recommend.